Focusing mainly upon language, communication, textuality, etc., as is overwhelmingly today's fashion, we miss the very raison d'être of literature and language itself.
Moving a step further in our investigation of the anthropologico-ontopoietic sources of the life-significance of literature by unravelling the function of imaginatio creatrix in man's self interpretation-in-existence, this collection seeks to bring forth the royal role of allegory in the fostering of culture.
A conjoint work of human elemental passions and of the human spirit, allegory mediates between lofty ideals of the highest human strivings and the pedestrian realm of facts.
Interpretative or theoretical studies encompass allegory -- mediaeval, modern and post-modern -- in various literatures. Among the authors are: Tymieniecka, Kronegger, Jorge Garcia Gomez, V. Osadnik, H. Hellerstein, H. Rudnick, R. Kiefer, V. Fichera, K. Haney, Ch. Raffini, J. Williamson, B. Ross and Sitansu Ray.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
One Ideals Elevating Reality.- Allegorical Journeys toward the Wholeness and Unity of the Sea: Marguerite Yourcenar.- Life and Myth: The Mother in Chinghiz Aitmatov's Literary Creation.- In Humble Conformity: Cipher and Vision in Jorge Guillén's Poetry.- Women in Taser Desk (The Land of Cards): Tagorean Ideals towards Humanistic Liberation.- Two The Mysteries of Life Enhanced.- War and the Body in Lysistrata: Marriage and the Family under Siege.- Allegorical Time.- The Roman de la rose: Psychological Interiority in Medieval Allegory.- Allegory in the Work of Philippe de Mézières.- Allegory and the Performative in Jacques le Fataliste.- Subjective Experience in Allegorical Worlds: Four Old French Literary Examples.- Three Freedom, Destiny, The Soaring of the Soul.- Type and Concept in Lazarillo de Tormes: Self-Knowledge and the Spanish Picaresque Narrative.- Ortega y Gasset, Phenomenology and Quixote.- Music and Language in Joyce's The Dead.- Between the Acts: Virginia Woolf's Modern Allegory.- Camus' Caligula: An Allegory?.- Beckett's Waiting for Godot as Allegory.- A Poetics of Absence: Kabbalist Allegory in the Poetry of Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and David Meltzer.- Nouvelle Approche à l'Allégorie avec Référence à Octavio Paz et Marin Sorescu.- Four Allegory, A Literary Enigma.- The Broken Allegory: Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child as Narrative Theodicy.- Ricoeur's Allegory and Jakobson's Metaphoric/Metonymic Principles.- The Radiant Veil: Persistence and Permutations.- Imagery and Allegory in Philosophy.- One Face Less: Masks, Time and the Telling of Stories in Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand Child.- Literary Criticism as Allegory: Sartre's Saint Genet.- Five Annex.- The Fragmentation and Social Reconstruction of the Past inToni Morrison's Beloved.- We Are Not the Same: Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and the Phenomenological Reduction.- Explanation, Understanding and Incommensurability in Psychoanalysis.- Some Remarks on the Application of Ingarden's Theory to Film Studies.- Phenomenology and Matthew Arnold: An Uncollected Episode.- Index of Names.